Sunday, 25 March 2018

Delta Green - thoughts about Convergence and the new edition

Last week I was asked at fairly short notice to run a game
of Delta Green for some friends at the Dice Saloon in Brighton. I chose the
vintage Delta Green adventure from the original softback from Pagan Publishing, called Convergence, written by John Tynes.

This is the second adventure in that supplement and was originally
written for Call of Cthulhu. I chose to run it with the new DG rules from ArcDream. Convergence is considered one of the better DG scenarios.

I’m not going to go into the detail of the adventure – this
post really dissects it from the point of view of a GM who is planning to
run it themselves in the future. I think it is worth the effort and is a commendable
scenario. It follows on from Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays which I would also
recommend, and which appears in the same book.

I used four pre-gen agents for the game, and the three
players were allowed to pick the agents they wanted to create F cell. This was a slightly
different Delta Green team from the usual fare:

Christie Ferranti (Agent Florence) – a nurse with the USAF
specialising in the health of air crew at high altitudes, USAF Biomedical Sciences
Corps

Wendell Delvecchio (Agent Frazier) – a USAF special
operator from Air Force Special Operations Command, stationed at MacDill air force base

This was a great session. I took a short time to explain the
setting to the players, allow them to fill in their bonds, and then it was
straight into the game!

The players were particularly up for some in-depth role
playing, and one of the strengths of the session was potentially also its
downfall. They took a long time interviewing Billy Ray Spivey - in character - before taking the
assignment to go to Groversville.

Operating under the cover story of FBI agents looking into
the possible presence of angel dust in the county, they then conducted a
lengthy interview with the local sheriff, with everybody around the table getting
into their roles, right down to the accents. This was helped by the fact that
two of the players had lived in the United States.

This consumed about 30-40 minutes of the game and was so
well-conducted and so enjoyable that similar discussions were held with other
NPCs. However, this also burned precious time.

I was aiming to complete the session inside three hours, which
I think was a tall order for Convergence. A typical convention slot is four
hours, and Convergence could conceivably fit into this.

The agents made a fast break through early on, having
discovered the body of UFO journalist Scott Adams (I made him a blogger as the
scenario needs a little updating from a technology perspective); they then
checked the guest register at Merle’s Shut Eye and realised Adams was
renting a second room, which then led them to the discovery of Jane Allen,
Billy Ray’s girlfriend. The team had been in Groversville for less than 24
hours by this stage and had not been apart at any stage, so there was no opportunity for any missing time antics.

With Agent Ferdinand hacking Adams’ laptop using his high Computer
Science skill, the agents quickly figured out it might be worth snooping around
the Ameley’s Hills area, where Adams had sighted helicopter activity.

At this point we were beginning to run out of time and I
wanted to see if we could push for a resolution. The group had brought in a two
man FBI team with hazmat suits to remove Adams’ body and take Allen away too.
They used an unmarked van, but they made the error of keeping the sheriff in
the loop, allowing the real enemy to also keep tabs on the progress of their
investigation. By this stage they were planning to leave for Ameley’s Hills
with the sheriff in tow to have a poke around. I decided that the opposition
would see this as a direct threat to their operation and pull the plug on the
experiment.

The DG team from Knoxville had also delivered the compound which
would allow the agents to check for protomatter (earlier than suggested in the
adventure, but this team was making break through after break through). I went
with the weaponized virus option suggested in the adventure, but made it more
fast acting. With the sheriff sickening, the team sprayed him with the compound
and quickly realised how prevalent the protomatter was.

The agents stopped the car in time to see a barn being
destroyed in the distance by a Majestic team of special operators (covering the
tracks of the real actors in this scenario). With Agent Florence now incapacitated
by the virus and obviously dying, Frazier and Ferdinand drove through a corn
field at high speed towards the burning barn (it was now midnight). Ferdinand
fluffed his Drive roll and crashed into a scare crow. Agent Frazier jumped out
of the car and saw the Majestic agents taking off in a helicopter gunship. He
opened fire at long range with his Glock and scored a critical, hitting one of
the Majestic agents and killing him outright. His body fell 50 feet into the
corn.

The rest of the Majestic team escaped, but the DG agents found
the body of the soldier they shot. By this stage both Ferdinand and Frazier
were deteriorating quickly and Florence was dead.

I allowed the agents one drive roll as they floored the
accelerator and made a break for the county line. Sadly Ferdinand missed this
one, crashing his car into a drainage ditch, and both agents succumbed by the
side of the road having made their final report to their handler in Knoxville.

I felt this was a good resolution for the game as the group
is unlikely to reconvene any time soon. Feedback from the players was very
positive. Two had never played Call of Cthulhu before. Convergence is obviously
a very good adventure, but I was being too ambitious trying to shoe horn it
into three hours.

I still have some reservations about the new DG rules
system: I’m torn between this and the Gumshoe system for this type of adventure. I didn’t
really make use of some of the new mechanics which I should have – for example
Will Power. Nor did we explore the use of bonds to mitigate Sanity loss,
although the agents did not lose that much Sanity, and bonds really only come
into their own as part of a longer campaign – they seem to have less value in a
one shot, other than to make it much less likely an agent will suffer a break
down, which can be part of the fun.

There is also no skill which covers passive perception – in Call
of Cthulhu you have Spot Hidden. In DG there is a Search skill, but I take this
to mean an active search. At one stage there was an opportunity to spot a towel
wedged under a door but at that point the agents were not conducting a search.
I suppose you could potentially use the Alertness skill, but it is not very
clear.

In summary I think Convergence is an excellent scenario,
which I’d willingly run again with a different group. The new DG rules are, I
think, better than vanilla Call of Cthulhu, but will take some getting used to.
I’m not convinced that they are superior to Gumshoe however. But then again, I’m
not completely convinced with Gumshoe either.

3 comments:

Alertness is to sense danger and Search is to find things that have been deliberately hidden. There's no passive perception as such, but an INTx5 roll could cover it.

Ben has the GM book and that may have some advice on how noticing things is supposed to work, but I've always tended to go with the Gumshoe approach of if it's a vital clue then the players find it without having to roll.

Having looked at the adventure for the first time in twentyish years (!) it doesn't look like the towel under the door has been deliberately hidden, so I would reveal that to the players without a roll.

If you were set on asking for a roll, I would use Alertness given the context of the scene.